http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
A GREAT evil stalks the world-again. Who would have believed, after the
Nazi Holocaust and the free world's triumphant Declaration of Human
Rights, that anyone would openly again foment hatred of Jews? But
that's just what happened at the Durban conference against racism last
week. The criticisms of the United States for walking out of the U.N.
conference are, in a word, perverted. Durban degenerated into such
vileness and hypocrisy, the troubling question is why so many stayed
when the mask of "anti-Zionism" slipped to reveal the hideous face of
antisemitism.

Martin Luther
King Jr. saw
through the
whole repellent
stunt decades
ago. "When
people criticize
Zionism," he
said, "they mean
Jews . . . .
Anti-Zionist is
inherently
antisemitic and
ever will it be so
. . . . And what
is anti-Zionist? It
is the denial to
the Jewish
people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa
and freely accord all other nations of the globe. It is discrimination
against Jews, my friend, because they are Jews. In short, it is
antisemitism."

We have come to expect antisemitism of the Arab world and the Muslim
world and the so-called nonaligned world. Still, it is shameful that
well-meaning American activists who belong to Human Rights Watch
and Amnesty International virtually stood by while Yasser Arafat and the
Palestine Liberation Organization hijacked the Durban conference and
its ideals.

Propaganda. Durban reflects a three-pronged antisemitic campaign.
The first is to trivialize the Holocaust by adding after all references to it
the words "and the ethnic cleansing of the Arab population in historic
Palestine." As if the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are
morally comparable. The campaign is a barefaced effort to delegitimize
the historical specificity of the Nazi killings as the cornerstone of the
moral argument for Israel's existence as a haven from antisemitic
persecution. The second prong is to insist that references to
antisemitism be linked with the "racist practices of Zionism" or, even
more absurdly, "Zionist practices against Semitism."

Finally, Israel is
caricatured as practicing a new kind of apartheid, with Zionism portrayed
as a movement based on racist supremacy. To characterize Judaism as
a race instead of a religion is racist propaganda. Israel, of course,
provides a special place for Jews, but that's because of their history of
persecution. The first President Bush had it right: "Zionism is not a
policy. It is an ideal that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish
people."

The claim that Israel is responsible for ethnic cleansing of the Arab
population turns truth squarely on its head. Anyone visiting Israel is
immediately struck by the fact that it is one of the world's most
multiethnic societies. Not only are there over a million Israeli Arabs with
the right to vote, but even an Arab-sponsored study recognized that the
Arabs who left during the 1948 war did so overwhelmingly at the urging
of Arab governments pending the Arab armies' "purging" of Jews from
the land.

The same Arab countries have actively sought to deny Palestinian
refugees the chance to reintegrate into the economic life of the region,
rendering them dispossessed and unemployed. And the Arabs have
cast out more than 800,000 Jews since 1948, men and women who now
make up a very sizable portion of Israel's population. Now that's ethnic
cleansing.

Kofi Annan, the U.N. secretary general, called on conferees in Durban to
admit that "all countries have issues of racism and discrimination." Fat
chance. It was too much to ask of the masters of hypocrisy who singled
out Israel. The double standard is not just latent. It is blatant. Who dared
mention Afghanistan's vengeful Taliban extremists? Or Russia's
destruction of Chechnya? Or China's assault on Buddhism in Tibet? And
what of the murder of thousands of Africans by rival tribes? Or the racist
campaign of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, the long history of oppression
against minorities in Arab countries, the slaughter of the Kurds, and the
Iranian clerics who jail or beat women if they walk unescorted or appear
without being fully covered? The list goes on.

At Durban, the inmates, finally, took over the asylum. They supported a
definition of human rights that, incredibly, appears to make no reference
to the right to vote, the right to assemble, the right to protest, freedom of
religion, or equality under the law. Instead, they oppose the only
democratic country in the Middle East, Israel, which has an independent
press, an independent judiciary, freedom of religion and speech, and
genuine political opposition.

No wonder the United Nations has been morally compromised. The
United States has lived up to its long and honorable history of rejecting
the equation of Zionism and racism. President Bush and Secretary of
State Colin Powell (who surely would have liked to confront racism in the
former cradle of apartheid) are to be commended for refusing to have
truck with such naked
hatred.

JWR contributor Mort Zuckerman is editor-in-chief and publisher of U.S. News and World Report. Send your comments to him by clicking here.